Trying to get this blog off the ground in the 2010s has been challenging. Most of that is simply finding the time to work on it. But motivation is elusive too, and repeatedly I’ve found that the design and organization of the blog don’t quite give me the juice I need to go forward, or the means to keep maintenance simple enough to let my time be used for thought and writing.

I’ve taken another crack at it, re-motivated by the opportunity to bring in techniques I’ve picked up in my professional life — particularly the notion of, for the first time in my personal blog-dom, using a development environment to really see what I was building instead of, as in the past, dismantling HTML prototypes into PHP chunks, moving them to the live server, and being prepared to make immediate fixes.

This post lays out how I went about it all and a lot of the tools and tips I used. As it happens, all the steps involved begin with “D.” Do with that what you will.

The decisive infraction was that, for the second time in two days, I was head-composing a social-media post in which the possible need for “whom” came up, but either I wasn’t sure whether it was the correct usage, or I knew it was correct but it looked/sounded awkward.

Even though they’re just social posts, I still treat them as writing. Even informally, the useful structures of traditional grammar matter to me.

Trying to get this blog off the ground in the 2010s has been challenging. Most of that is simply finding the time to work on it. But motivation is elusive too, and repeatedly I’ve found that the design and organization of the blog don’t quite give me the juice I need to go forward, or the means to keep maintenance simple enough to let my time be used for thought and writing.

I’ve taken another crack at it, re-motivated by the opportunity to bring in techniques I’ve picked up in my professional life — particularly the notion of, for the first time in my personal blog-dom, using a development environment to really see what I was building instead of, as in the past, dismantling HTML prototypes into PHP chunks, moving them to the live server, and being prepared to make immediate fixes.

This post lays out how I went about it all and a lot of the tools and tips I used. As it happens, all the steps involved begin with “D.” Do with that what you will.